BATTERSEA Buildings Notes

BRITISH BRICK SOCIETY London Meeting Saturday 27 June 2015 BATTERSEA Buildings Notes INTRODUCTION It is difficult to know how to characterise Battersea, a compact London Borough from 1889 to 1974; but now for over forty years the eastern part of the enlarged London Borough of Wandsworth. The upturned –L-shaped area of the former borough was the late medieval parish of St Mary’s, Battersea, but shorn of the remaining outlier at Penge. Post-1066 land alienations make it clear that the original Manor of Battersea had stretched across a swathe of south London south of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s manor of Lambeth. On the southern bank of the River Thames, the northern part of the former borough comprises six distinct areas, the first three from east to west and the second three from west to east: 1. Industrial Battersea, east of Chelsea Bridge and the railway lines into London Victoria. This includes the now infamous Battersea power station. 2. Battersea Park, the area between Chelsea Bridge and Battersea Bridge, including Battersea Park Road and other roads immediately south of the park. 3. Old Battersea, between Battersea Bridge and Wandsworth Bridge, with the original village settlement round Battersea parish church and a secondary, but at times more populous settlement, around York Place where a brick house, long since demolished, was built in the 1470s. 4. Around Clapham Junction. Apart from the relatively new station buildings, there are several commercial and other buildings of interest. 5. Civic Battersea along Lavender Hill; the former town hall (now arts centre) and the public library are part of this area, together with the best of the Anglican churches built in the Victorian era. 6. Park Town. A development of the 1860s and 1870s. In the course of the research for this visit, lists were made of three specific building types: housing estates both Victorian and twentieth-century; Victorian churches; and school buildings. Examples to be seen will be noted individually in the four areas described. At the end of the nineteenth century, the pioneer social investigator Charles Booth characterised Battersea as “half blue for poverty or black for destitution and half pink for comfortable working class”. The nineteenth-century housing which remains was built for the latter. There are some houses built by and for the late-nineteenth-century middle classes but their occupants seem rapidly departed (see below about T.J. Bailey, for example). There were plenty of long-term employment opportunities in Battersea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the candle-making factory and the flour mills in Old Battersea, both adjacent to the river. Railway work was centred on the London and South Western Railway’s station at Nine Elms and their carriage works at Longhedge. Railway jobs offered stable, year-round employment. If you did not fancy railway work, there was the alternative of the gasworks but many gasworks jobs were seasonal; however, they could be combined with clay winning at a brickyard. Battersea has not been one of the happy hunting grounds of architectural commentators, who in any case prefer London north of the river to south London. Nikolaus Pevsner in 1952 was typical: Any but the most enthusiastic sightsee will confine his visit to Battersea to the [parish] church, Old Battersea House, the Ascension, and perhaps, if he is interested in Late Victorian architecture, some of the public buildings. 1 Ignoring the comment on the specific gender of the enquirer, there is more to Battersea than Pevsner made out. Brick actually came early to Old Battersea. In the late 1460s, on his own initiative, Lawrence Booth, the Bishop of Durham, began building a brick house in York Place, a small house designed to be a London residence when Durham House, near the city, was taken over for a diplomatic mission as was frequently the case. He continued building the house when in 1476 he was translated to become Archbishop of York, a post he held until his death in 1480. It was used in different ways by his two of immediate successors. Thomas Rotherham (Abp York 1480-1500) was there in September 1482, in February and March 1483, in April 1488, in January 1489, and at various times in 1492: these are all periods when episcopal documents were issued from there. Thomas Wolsey (Abp York 1514-1530) used the site’s brickworks for his extensive alterations to York Place on the north bank of the Thames where government offices now stand on the east side of Whitehall. York Place became Whitehall Palace when taken over by Henry VIII on Wolsey’s fall from power and grace in 1529. After 1530, it seems to have been used far less by Wolsey’s successors as archbishop. Each of Lee, Holgate and Heath are better known for disputes with their tenants rather than residing there although when Holgate was deprived of office in March 1554, the house was plundered and his possessions stolen. In 1556, Queen Mary granted Suffolk Place to the see of York as its London residence: York Place, Battersea, being considered insufficiently grand for England’s second most senior cleric. In 1580, Archbishop Sandys was persuaded somewhat reluctantly to allow use of York House as a prison for papist recusants. Thereafter it was let: in May 1630 to Isabel Peele. As with all property in the hands of senior Anglican ecclesiastics, York Place was sold in 1648. And while restored to the see in 1660, the house was invariably let and the archbishops when in London chose to reside elsewhere. In the nineteenth century, the archbishop had the choice between an hotel or his London club. INDUSTRIAL BATTERSEA Vauxhall Bridge to Chelsea Bridge Vauxhall, where the visit begins because it has good transport links, takes its name from Faulkes Hall, named after its builder, the infamous Faulke de Breauté, henchman of King John, and in the reign of Henry III the scourge of more than one county, not least Bedfordshire: he is famed for being besieged in Bedford castle in 1225 and less well-known for earlier building a second castle in Luton, the remnant of the bank of the outer bailey of which was still visible in the early 1950s. The fields shown between Park Street, Crawley Green Road, the River Lea, and the southern edge of the churchyard on Luton’s Tithe Map of 1842 represent the extent of the castle precinct. The building of the castle in the 1221 led indirectly to the destruction of the central tower of St Mary’s church, Luton, in 1336: with much weakened foundations following the great rains of the 1310s and 1320s, it fell down across the south arcade and south aisle. The relatively shallow foundations cut into the gravel knoll on which the church sits had been weakened by excess water seeping into them from the nearby River Lea. Vauxhall was the original location of the Vauxhall Hydraulic Engineering Company which in 1905 moved 30 miles north to a greenfield site on the southern edge of Luton; here it developed into Vauxhall Motors, the well-known motor car manufacturer. Between Vauxhall and Battersea is an area of redevelopment including the new Embassy to London of the United States on the south side of Nine Elms Road and between the road and the River Thames many apparently upmarket apartment blocks, all glass and steel. Not a brick is to be seen in these. However, various tall housing blocks on the south side of Nine Elms Road have brick cladding. There is a striking one clad in light red brick, the uppermost storeys of which oversail those beneath them and another in dark brown brick. These are clearly visible from the bus on its left-hand side. 2 Whilst the large building of the New Covent Garden Market is not built of brick, the outer wall between the site and the road has been constructed of a dark brown brick laid in Flemish Bond. Battersea between Vauxhall Bridge and Chelsea Bridge was developed as an industrial area long before the now infamous Battersea Power Station was conceived. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the area between the river and the principal railway line from London to a swathe of southern England from Portsmouth to north Devon and north Cornwall was turned into a great mass of small scale industrial enterprises, among them brickworks, tileworks and ironworks. Hitherto, the main road from Lambeth to Wandsworth had been a pleasant country road lined by elm trees, hence its name ‘Nine Elms’. These enterprises had mostly disappeared before the building of the power station but one reminder of their prevalence is the Waterworks Pumping Station on Kirtling Street. The ‘sub- Georgian’ beam engine house of circa 1840 is built in brick. Industry was thus well-established when the first half of Battersea Power Station was erected in the years between 1929 and 1935; the second half was not built until 1944-55 and had a comparatively short life, both parts being closed in 1983. Regrettably, saving the great bulk of the power station has become a “cause” for the Twentieth Century Society which has coloured much of the writing about the structure, still impressive in its damaged state. No one seems to know what to do with this great hulk, but because Sir Giles Gilbert Scott got involved one influential body of opinion (the Twentieth Century Society) thinks that it should be preserved in perpetuity. There is, however, a contrary view, ably expressed by Thom Gorst in The Buildings Around Us: Yet even if these great buildings helped to turn the industrial shed into architecture, it needs more than this historical achievement to justify keeping them.

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